State of Decay 2 [Breaks 1 Million Player Mark] in First Two Days of Global Release

Aaron Greenberg: "As we close out our first week of the zombie apocalypse, we wanted to welcome and say thank you to the over one million fans playing State of Decay 2, helping break the million player mark, and answering the question: how will you survive? Since Early Access for the Ultimate Edition on May 18 and the global release of the Standard Edition on May 22, we have had over a million survivors across the globe playing and creating their own zombie survival story."

Update:

Admin note: title update for that bad misrepresentation of 'record', inferring it broke a previous record when it merely broke past 1m players.

@liquid, you may think they are pointless but they ARE used to measure success. To MS it shows engagement. Players are playing the game and racking up these stats. It beats having the game just sitting on ones shelf doing nothing like the majority of games do when they get beaten.

Microsoft pulled the same stunt with Sea of Thieves announcing record breaking sales and the same exact "1 million players in first 2 days". Then the real numbers revealed only 202K copies sold in its first week.

Do you really think it takes an average of 2 days to finish games? How does one measure success by tracking the collection of in game items? That doesn't mean they liked it or not or if they bothered to even finish the game.

Also, why is this player count and not sales? If I try out a timed trial or demo, do I count?

Stop making up excuses. This is the typical dodgy, untransparent MS we saw in 2013-2014. This E3, we're going to see them break records for most smoke and mirrors. Hope they reveal that number, too to measure success.

Units sold and players playing are not congruent when Game Pass allows people to play without a purchase. Obviously engagement is important now. Players playing equates to popularity and is a valid metric (not the only one that's important though).

Only the ignorant are "being misled", lol. It's obvious that SoT and SoD2 are successful in spite of people like you and the metacritic scores. Thankfully, I don't play fanboy trolling any more than I play popularity. I play games that I enjoy.

It's relevant because God of War recently released, actually broke real records, and had real numbers reported. That's an example of what Microsoft does not do. Instead, Microsoft announces some fuzzy engagement numbers knowing damn well certain people will mistake them for sold through. With the inception of game pass those engagement numbers are not at all indicative of sold through numbers due to the vast majority of players playing on a trial bases only.

They did the same thing with Sea of Thieves claiming it broke records. They stated 2 million players and you had people on N4G holding onto the idea that Sea of Thieves was a success because it "sold 2 million copies". People actually said that. But the real first week numbers revealed a paltry 200K sold. Insinuating Sea of Thieves being a record breaking success turned out a lie, and now Microsoft is pulling the same stunt with another poorly exclusive.

He's getting rosted because he is hypocritical numbers don't matter to MS until they paint them in a favorable light. SoD2 isn't breaking any real records nice to see that the game broke the one million mark but that's not saying much considering the state in which the game was release if anything it say's more about MS and their fans that they are willing to overlook massive flaws in a game only because it's a console exclusive.

Every time they release a new game even if its mediocre they ask the intern to come up with catchy records phrase lol The game can sell 30,000 and theyll say "those 30,000 have broken records in play time" At this point i look forward monthly to these cool blurbs.

It’s not about games. It’s about business model between MS and Sony. Sony is willing to show their hardware and software to the public and investors to make sure how the progression is going. MS on the other hand, they only show software to the public, but not with hardware which question the consumer and investors. If Nintendo Switch surpass Xbox One in term of sales, MS would be embarrassed and humiliated by both competitors.

And if Sony were in that position, they would do the exact same thing as they've done in the past. Plus even go as far lying like they did with move numbers on live television at launch. So now it's no longer about games and services? Really. Wtf..smdh!

Lol someone’s upset, Why would you be mad cause he says that they break their 1 Million player base record for a small gaming developer company. Don’t be mad cause you misinterpret what they were talking about.

How many of those people weren't planning on buying any of the games available on gamepass in the first place? 100 x 0 = 0. How many people play a game on game pass, like it, then buy it for a discount? 100 x 10 + 100 x 40 = 5000. Looks like they are making an infinite amount more then they would have.

Well I am playing SoD2 using a trial of game pass for PC. The game is ok. But will I subscribe or buy the game.? No probably not. It's just not that interesting to me right now. So is the game some runaway success for XBox? I doubt it.

They never said anything about sales anywhere. Only a clueless fanboy could read that statement and not have the basic reading comprehension to understand what was stated here. Gamepass seems to be getting used quite a bit.

Yeah...or there really isn't much alternative. They have a service that lets subscribers play the game. So they will talk about players. Like they did here. Would anything change if they announced the split - outside of forum wars?

They would be happy with a million people using game pass or a million in physical sales. No one's passing anything off as sales, this is their metric from now on.

Well, it didn’t help Sea Of Thieves neither, did it ? We know it’s rumor on VGChart, but SoT only sold 202.456 units or something like that. It didn’t succeeded, did it ? No wonder why Xbox devs feel lack of confidence. Even worse, EA revealed how Xbox One have sold 29 million units. You know what is funny that MS take their expectations way too high In every ways to make sure they look perfect. It’s very predictable from MS.

Across PC, Gamepass on Consoles, and people who bought the game. Collect all the crumbs and bring them all together and count to 1 million. That is not a lot of players in the first week. That sounds like it's the peak players. The drop will happen just like SOT.

What is the problem? You guys always try to find bad things in everything but I have a good news for you, you always will have job because you can always find something bad on everything so keep it up!